“I’ve never worn a scarf in my life,” Brulard heard, as she tentatively wandered past the Swiss couple, both of them still young and childishly blond and giving her an indifferent, dubious glance, as if, thought Brulard, they weren’t entirely convinced she was there.
“Yes, you did, you did — and a yellow scarf, furthermore,” the man insisted. “That day, you tied a yellow scarf around your neck.”
“A wonderful, wonderful film,” Jimmy said again, ingratiating and obsequious, with a certain lively, quick-witted grace.
But, wondered Brulard, what did he really want from these people? Or did he not want anything from them at all, but wanted only to keep her from leaving, by creating a diversion from her distress, from her sorrow — for surely one glance at Brulard’s face had shown him she hadn’t found that state of joy and superiority without which her flight had no purpose?
* * *
A sort of gauzy veil imprisoned Brulard’s head as she walked through the flag-draped streets, Jimmy on her right, holding her elbow so delicately that at first she didn’t feel it, and when she did finally take note of that discreet support, the unpleasantness of having to express anything at all dispensed her from stepping away from Jimmy. Was he desperately wanting to touch her before he never had the chance again? Or was this a way of holding her captive, of pretending that, so gently herded, she’d allow herself to be led, unresisting, to the train, to the house?
Those days are over, she wanted to tell him, my life’s different now, and I’m so far away from you that. . But she feared that the slightest word might shatter her skull.
The dog trotted along obediently on her left. Framed by Jimmy and his hideous dog, Brulard felt pathetic, ridiculous. A wave of pity and anger welled up inside her. A vague indignation struggled to poke through her fogged thoughts, born, she knew well, of a painful awareness that she was not going to be left alone.
“Lovely town,” Jimmy was saying. “Ah, how nice.”
And then, whispering a still-stunned desolation into her ear:
“Why did you go away? Why?”
Brulard looked, unseeing, at the pale yellow and almond green facades, the luxurious shop windows, the souvenir stores with awnings weighed down by multiple cowbells, a whole landscape that she now knew so well, having paced through it each day since she came here, and toward which she had come to feel only resentment. Those same little flower-decked bridges straddling the canals, those same cobblestone streets, overlooked by those same charming balconies that Jimmy was now stopping to admire, his chin raised and his hand pressed visor-like to his forehead, letting out half stifled gasps of pleasure, had seen her morning after morning, fighting back a mounting despondency, an everless-latent panic, as she made her way back from the bank where the same circumspect, taciturn woman had once again shaken her head and tersely informed her that no deposit had been made to her account, and Brulard had learned to despise this whole delightful setting, wondering in panic to what extent all these pretty things were laughing at her.
Had Jimmy not just raised that very question of money?
He’d started walking again, sharply tugging Brulard along, his pace brisker now, and Brulard thought he’d asked her an uncomfortable question about money. Brulard was feeling more carefree. She realized that, for her part (and it wasn’t yet time to start suffering for Jimmy, and when that time did come her own good fortune would smother any overly burdensome remorse in Brulard, so she hoped), she had no real reason not to go on waiting and hoping. A delay, an unforeseen complication, something she didn’t yet know of, something she would soon learn: that was probably the whole cause of her despair, because she didn’t know. And, in a way, that ignorance wasn’t real.
“Well?” Jimmy was asking in a troubled voice.
“Am I really here with you now?” Brulard asked in surprise.
“How are you managing financially?”
“Oh, I’ve got some money these last few days.”
“From him? You sure?”
“Yes,” Brulard firmly answered.
“Then. .” (All at once Jimmy’s voice was so slow, so quiet, that Brulard could scarcely hear it.) “If that’s true, then I suppose. . you might be able to help me out. It wouldn’t have to be much, but. . ”
Brulard’s thigh began to vibrate. With labored nonchalance, she took out her telephone. Uniformly tall, good-looking, and athletic, happy passers-by jostled her, not seeing her, with her diminutive build and, that morning, her gray face, and all around them, from what Brulard could make out here and there, the sole subject of conversation was the quality of the snow and the food.
The mountain had come closer. Now it was perfectly clear.
Brulard let out a small laugh, thinking: my mother never protected me from anything at all.
She held the telephone a few centimeters from her ear, saying nothing. Jimmy anxiously looked on, but she couldn’t bring herself to give him a smile or still her trembling chin for his sake. Turning off her phone, she silenced the voice that was, beyond all doubt, speaking specifically to her, uttering her full name with such fury but also such hateful grief that her legs were still weak and burning hot.
Jimmy asked her no questions. Brulard concluded that he would ask her nothing more about these phone calls. He knows what all this is about, or can guess, from something he knows and I don’t, something he knows I don’t know, she thought, calmly perceptive, her mind suddenly clear, almost cold, impassive, capable of accepting the worst and not seeking it out but encouraging it, if it had to be, to reveal itself. What he knows and is afraid I might learn: that might even be why he came here, she went on to think. But is it because he wants me to know, or because he wants to make sure I don’t?
“Jimmy, why did you come here?” said Brulard, very quietly, so as not to frighten him.
“To take you home with me. So you wouldn’t be alone,” said Jimmy, looking straight ahead, his jaw hardened.
A progressive reddening revealed a network of dilated capillaries on Jimmy’s thin, hollow cheeks.
“What makes you think I’m alone?”
“I think you are. You’re out walking with me and my dog, aren’t you?”
And Brulard realized he was putting on this breezy display to conceal his discomfort and apprehension. Suddenly she saw him, despite his new clothes (new, but made of cheap leather, she observed), as a pitiful and ridiculous person, although often managing to hide it with a certain grace. Jimmy cut a sad figure, not that it was really his fault. Quickly and instinctively, she caressed his cheek. For had Jimmy ever once attained even a modicum of success in anything he’d done? Jimmy had made a life for himself, in a mediocre, half-baked way, always overestimating his abilities, and whenever luck smiled on him a little he wasted no time losing the money in cunning, vaguely demeaning ventures, such as, Brulard recalled, a certain kiosk built and manned by Jimmy in a suburban mall, where he offered to make his customers a pin bearing their likeness while they waited, with the aid of an implausible machine bought at an exorbitant price through a want ad, or else a pizzeria, sadly situated at the intersection of two highways, which Jimmy had taken over, aiming to make it a regular haunt for people in Brulard’s circle, and which to this day he hadn’t managed to sell, so strongly did the walls and the site exude failure, unhappiness, stupidity.
Now Jimmy was here, stubborn and tireless, hard-headedly confident in his ability to put up a good front, even if, as Brulard could see in the luminous air, the brilliant light of the lake, he’d so flagrantly and definitively aged — which is to say that no trick, no subtle arrangement of the hair on his forehead, or his high-buttoned shirts, could now prevent anyone noticing, before anything else, his hunched back, his bowed legs’ irreversible thinness, the coarsened grain of his skin, the shadowy veil over his eyes, which, for a few seconds, when Jimmy thought himself out of sight, turned lost, evasive, and devious.